Henry Bliss alights from a streetcar on the Upper West Side and steps into automotive history when he’s hit and killed — by a cab, of course — making him the first person in North America to die this way.

Henry Bliss alights from a streetcar on the Upper West Side and steps into automotive history when he’s hit and killed — by a cab, of course — making him the first person in North America to die this way.

1815: English mathematician George Boole, who would help establish what is now known as Boolean logic, is born. Boole’s breakthrough was the insight that logic, which had previously been considered a branch of philosophy, was actually closer to mathematics. All you needed to do was express logical problems in a symbolic format, and they could […]

1978: Three Americans take off in a balloon from Presque Isle, Maine. They will land in a field north of Paris 137 hours, 6 minutes later, the first people to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. After Lindbergh’s famous 1927 flight, crossing the Atlantic in a balloon remained one of the last great unconquered aviation […]

1866: After years of planning, development and more than a few snafus, the trans-Atlantic cable is successfully laid and put into operation. Telegraphic communication was in its infancy — it had only been 22 years since Samuel F.B. Morse made his historic transmission between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore — when the cable, stretching from Follhummerum […]

1919: John Alcock and Arthur Brown land their Vickers Vimy airplane in a bog in Clifden, Ireland, marking the end of the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. It’s a good bet to win a drink at a bar: “Do you know who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic in an airplane, […]